Tropics look to remain busy as we leave summer behind

Aside from Karl and Lisa which will both turn out to sea, I will be watching this area of energy moving off the coast of Africa. Several of the computer models indicate the chance for this to develop next week as it moves westward.

Summer is over. Football season is back. Baseball begins to look ahead to the World Series and soon enough the big box stores will roll out the Christmas displays. Yes, fall 2016 is here but will the hurricanes follow? So far, it’s been fairly benign with the exception of Earl and Hermine – both category one hurricanes with limited overall impacts. As we begin to look ahead to cooler nights, shorter days and eventually frost on the pumpkins, we still have to be wary of potential threats from the tropics.

Right now, we have two tropical storms, both of which have been struggling due to stronger upper level winds than normal across the tropical Atlantic. One of those storms, Karl, should become a hurricane as it turns north and eventually northeast and away from the United States. Karl may pass close enough to Bermuda to warrant a tropical storm warning at some point but the impacts should be minimal since the track will be to the south and east of the region. Hopefully, for the sake of the surfing community along the East Coast, Karl can strengthen over open water and at least send some increased swells back towards the coast. We’ll have to just wait and see about that.

Meanwhile, Lisa is also suffering from adverse environmental conditions which will limit strengthening as the storm moves on a path towards the open Atlantic as we get in to the weekend.

This leaves us with a new pattern setting up as we get in to early next week. There are two distinct areas that I will be watching: the western Gulf of Mexico and the deep tropics between Africa and the Windward Islands.

The first significant cold front of the season will finally drop in to Texas and push off in to the western Gulf of Mexico where we might see a low develop sometime next week. How strong and organized this low might be remains to be seen but dropping a frontal boundary in to the Gulf where water temps are in the upper 80s is just asking for something to pop up. Obviously this needs to be watched closely since it would be close to land already.

The other area I will be watching is the deep tropics as we get in to next week as well. For several days in a row, the general consensus of the global models is to develop a low pressure area at quite a low latitude and send it west towards the Windward Islands. Right now, there is a tropical wave and weak area of energy moving through west Africa that would be the seedling of this potential low pressure system. It’s days away from getting better organized but the remarkable consistency in the models leads me to believe it is at least worth watching. Given the lower latitude that it would be tracking along, the odds of it turning out to sea early are reduced and as such, it could be an issue for the eastern Caribbean later next week.

I will go over all of these areas in greater detail during my daily video discussion which will be posted early this afternoon here, on our YouTube channel and in our app.

M. Sudduth 9:15 AM ET Sept 22

About Mark Sudduth

Greetings! I am Mark Sudduth, the founder and editor of HurricaneTrack.com. The site began in 1999 as a way to post info concerning tropical storms and hurricanes for any interested visitors. Little did I know how big it would become in the years since. Now, we have millions of visitors from all over the world who have come to rely on the site as a no non-sense, tell it like it is resource for all things hurricane related. We are supported by a combination of corporate sponsors and our loyal Client Services members who subscribe to premium content on our sister site, premium.hurricanetrack.com. I am married with six energetic and intelligent children and live in southeast North Carolina. I graduated UNC-Wilmington in 1995 with a BA in Geography and have studied the effects of hurricanes on our society ever since.